Rhapsodies

For this week’s selection I decided to watch some films from Vincent Price’s early career, and by sheer happenstance, also the early career of Charles Bronson,.

I had grown up with Vincent Price being  carefully crafted self parody feeling kind of like a loving but very creepy favorite uncle. I had gotten a taste of just how good and scary he could be when I first saw The Abominable Dr Phibes so I wanted to see other examples of what made him the godfather of horror.

The first film I watched wasn’t a horror film , though it did feature an over the top megalomaniac, was Master of the World with Price playing Jules Verne’s other mad genius, Robur the Conqueror, who tries to blast the world into abandoning war from his airship, the Albatross,

While this was fun, and Price puts on an appropriately driven performance, Master of the World felt like a low rent response to Disney’s 1954 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, and it never really managed to trigger my suspension of disbelief. Not just because the Albatross aways looked like the model in front of a blue screen that it was, but also because I kept wondering if there was any infrastructure behind the Albatross and where would Robur go once they ran out of ammunition.

Along with Price’s performance what interested me the most was the conflict between Bronson’s pragmatic American agent who would do what it took to wait for the right moment in order to stop Robur’s plans and the much more traditional  hero, played by David Frankham who wants to do what is right as soon as possible and mistakes Bronson’s pragmatism for cowardice.

The comic relief from Vito Scotti playing the ship’s cook was entertaining too.

The second film was one of the horror classics of the 1950s House of Wax. Price is at his best as an eccentric sculptor and proprietor of a wax museum who is driven mad and terribly scarred when he is caught in a fire caused by his business partner to destroy the wax museum for the insurance money.  He becomes a serial killer who uses his victims as models for his new wax museum encasing them in molten wax. (Bronson played his mute assistant, Igor)

I had known about this movie’s plot since high school and so I ws very much watching it in a “Rosebud was his sled” state of mind. So as I watched this I couldn’t help wondering if the director intended for this to be a mystery at all if the reveal of the wax statues being murder victims was meant to be a surprise. Price’s burn makeup didn’t really disguise him so I was not fooled when he reappears running the titular House of Wax seemingly unscathed by the fire (revealed to be a wax disguise in the end) I don’t know how much of a difference this would have made in the long run but it was a detail that I couldn’t help thinking about over and over.

All in all this was some fun over the top campy entertainment. In the end what I liked about it the most was it avoided the usual cliche of the police being useless (perhaps that became a cliche later) Anyway while they were certainly skeptical when our heroes arrive with their concerns but ultimately they put the pieces together on their own and ultimately, despite our dashing young heroes best efforts, are the ones who save the day.